5 Tricks To Lower CPA Without Dropping Conversions

As your PPC campaigns mature you’ll be faced with the challenge of reducing the overall cost of your paid ads strategy, without hurting conversions. It’s no easy task, but an essential one of you want to make your PPC efforts more efficient and maximise your ROI.

To pull this off you’ll need to reduce something we call cost per action or cost per acquisition (CPA). Basically, this means how much you pay for each conversion and you can even bid based on a figure you’re willing to pay. Today though, we’re looking at five ways to reduce this number, maintain conversion rate and increase your PPC profits.

#1: Optimise your landing pages
A great place to start is by optimising your landing pages for each campaign. First of all, you may not want traffic from each campaign landing on the same page – so consider this in your strategy – and whichever page you decide users need to land on, make sure they’re optimised to seal the deal.
Convincing headlines, compelling content, calls to action, plus a host of design and UX factors have a huge impact on your conversion rate, which improves your CPA by default.

#2: Increase your Quality Score
Increase your Quality Score and you can directly reduce your CPA, while increasing the position of your ads. It all starts with keywords and this means plenty of research to establish the most relevant keywords people use to find your products and services. Then you need to refine your ad copy to make it equally relevant and compelling enough to get people clicking.

#3: Segment by device
Google has sadly removed the option to target mobile devices, but you can still do your best to target users on the go. First of all you have bid modifiers to increase or decrease bids for ads for different devices, while you can also optimise your ads for mobile. Alternatively, Bing Ads still gives you the option to target specific device types – one area where Microsoft’s paid search platform beats Google hands down.

#4: Segment by location
Delve into your data and you’ll probably find your ads perform much better in certain locations. You may even find your ads don’t cut it at all in some places and you could be wasting par of budget on people who are highly unlikely to buy into your brand. So it’s also worth segmenting by location if your data reveals poor (or particularly well) performing areas.

#5: Refine your remarketing efforts
People who have shown enough interest in your brand to visit your website are more likely to buy into your products and services, which is where PPC marketing comes into play. If you’re not already targeting these people, then it’s time to get started – but you can also improve your remarketing efforts by going back to your audience to determine the most effective crowd to target.

Finally, test your strategy with CRO
There are many other approaches to lowering your CPA and maintaining, or even increasing conversions (which we’ll cover in later posts). Whichever methods you take, you’ll want to delve into conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and split testing to fine tune your PPC strategy. Don’t worry if you’re new to CRO though, because we’ll be back in our next post to take your through the basics.